Here is a cheap and easy way to impress your dates, friends and family and to make your everyday vegan food look uber fancy. We've all seen the fancy restaurant portions of little food artistically mounted onto a plate for the "ouuus" and "ahhhs" only to leave you still fucking hungry! So my solution, stack your own food.
Stacking food, especially into little towers of alternating flavours looks impressive and isn't very hard. Best of all, you get enough to eat and hey, this might even get you laid. Now, normally I don't give two rats asses about presentation, I want tasty food and I wanted it now damn it. But if you have people to impress or want to try something new here are a few easy tips.
1)Use edibles to create beds, baskets, mounds or cups to present your food on. Because no one wants to pick out paper or plastic from their food when they sit down to eat. Dress up plain plates with drizzles of sauce, a bed of lettuce or get really fancy and cut carrots and other vegetables into cute little shapes to arrange.
2)For some reason humans are fascinated and excited about food in shapes. Molds are an easy way to do this, now this doesn't mean you should go out and buy all kinds of fancy equipment but the next time you make say a grain/noodle/mashed potatoes try experimenting with what you have available. Spray some oil into a mug, tupper ware contain, old EB container etc and try different shapes it may take some practice but once you master it you can create layers by alternating sauce, vegetables (squash etc works nicely). Rissorto work really well for this.
3) finally the easiest of all is food towers. Which is basically stacking your food on the plate, alternating sauces/toppings with your main dish. This works in a variety of ways, you could do tofu rounds, eggplant rounds, polenta rounds and basically make all your food round or you could use different shapes and for an alternating pattern. Sometimes I find using a variety of shapes gives a dish more appeal for example my breakfast:
Tofu triangles stacked onto a bed of sauteed mushrooms with onion and then repeated until finished surrounded by rounded potatoes. This is a very simple dish, but it gets fancier just because of the way it is plated.
iron skillet with Olive Oil and fry onions until crispy. While you wait on the potatoes combine the other ingredients and mash well (to insure there are no garlic chunks). Whip the miso mixture until smooth and combine with the cooked potatoes. Mash together. Top with your onions and enjoy.
